Fight the Terrorists, Not the Bombs

Good news for those of you who enjoy taking your shoes off in airports. Al-Qaeda’s chief bombmaker, a cheerful fellow named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who sent his younger brother off on a suicide bombing mission with a bomb up his rectum, has been working on turning everything into a bomb. Cameras, printer cartridges and even pets.

The good news is that al-Asiri isn’t very good at it. His bomb did a good job of killing his brother, but not much else. The original underwear bomb worn by the Christmas bomber didn’t work out. The bad news is that with enough cannon fodder and enough attempts, sooner or later al-Asri or another college dropout will get it right. But even if he doesn’t, the force multiplier of the threat alone will do the job.

All it took was one shoe bomber to get us to take off our shoes. A failed plan to blow up airliners with liquid explosives led to the liquid ban. In the age of underwear bombs we have naked scanners. What is going to happen when the next plot involves explosives surgically implanted in the human body or in a pet?

A bomb anywhere is a bomb everywhere. When the bombs are everywhere, then so are the security measures taken against them until life is one big bomb and one giant security measure.

We may sooner or later hunt down al-Asiri and blow him away, but taking out a twenty-something graduate of a Saudi university after a long manhunt at a cost of countless millions of dollars will not be some grand achievement. There are plenty of Saudi, Kuwaiti and Pakistani chemistry students who can step into his exploding shoes.

We are not fighting a war against toothpaste, shoes or underwear. Nor against bombs. Bombs after all don’t make themselves or detonate themselves. That’s what people are for and until we come to grips with the people making and detonating the bombs, then we will go on living in a world of bombs, where every item, no matter how innocuous, is treated as a potential explosive device, and every person in line as a potential explosive weapon.

The formula for fighting a War on Terror without defining a vector for that terror has led to a state of terror, in which everyone is either terrified or terrorized. The official word is that anyone and everyone can be a terrorist, and even though they all seem to be Muslim, the official position is that this is a complete coincidence, a misunderstanding of the religion of peace or a result of our foreign policy.

To believe any of these things is to also believe that history is bunk. Al-Asiri’s last name indicates that he comes from the Asir province, the heartland of fanaticism in Saudi Arabia. Asir means “difficult” in Arabic. Six of the 9/11 hijackers came from Asir and Bin Laden praised its tribes as “forming the lion’s share.” Asir had been a source of violence and Islamic fanaticism long before American foreign policy mattered to anyone outside the hemisphere. The Asiri Wahhabis had fought the Ottoman Empire in Asir going back to the early 1800s and then they fought the House of Saud. With global access, Asiris are able to extend their wars deep into our territory. To launch attacks well beyond their desert home.

The sword has given way to the bomb, though it is still used occasionally on hostages, and by importing Islam we have imported the way of the sword and the rule of the bomb. When the followers of the sword take the plane, then sooner or later they will bomb the plane or use the plane as a guided missile. There is no avoiding that.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

PaulM

I don’t see another answer. How are we supposed to deal with an entire ideology?

We can’t fight Islam. All we can do is secure airports, keep things quiet and wait for it to blow over.

moshe

Why can't we fight Islam? It's easy:

1) Outlaw it
2) Deport its adherents
3) Kill millions of them for every one of us as a policy. If a Moslem terrorist blows up a plane full of our people, we figure out which Moslem country he comes from and drop a nuke on its biggest city. If we can't figure out where he came from, just pick a large Moslem city at random.

The Islam problem would go away after only a couple of demonstrations. The Moslems themselves will put an end to the terrorism. Not because they love us, but because they again FEAR US.

http://longhorn-project.org Robin Rosenblatt

The more bombs they make the better they get at it. Practice make perfect.

pagegl

Probably time for a new Crusade.

Gunner57

What can we do??? STOP ALL MIUSLIM IMMGRATION.

Gunner57

Start deporting Muslims too.

WilliamJamesWard

America will stay in denial and eventually have all freedoms destroyed by Leftist/Socialist/Islamist
subversives with the battle everywhere fighting destructive government regulations and
creeping Sharia Laws and increasing violent attacks. Now is the time to rid America of the Islamist
curse and Leftist subversion, Deportations, government change and the elimination of anti-American
workers in all government agencies. Vote out the end of America in November and demand those
placed in Office cleans the Nation of all enemies foreign and domestic………………William

marat 1

Islam is incredibly sexually repressed. There are, in fact, speculations by Western shrinks that much of Islamic Terror may stem from the exploitation of young males in the madrasses who are forced to have sex with the Imams (excuse me ma'am). May I suggest that the Western nations form a coalition to drop hundreds of thousands of tons of the most hard core pornography, accompanied by sex toys, etc., etc. Sure they would call us "the Devil." So what, they will do that anyway. It could keep their populations in perpetual sexual frenzy and too exhausted by chronic masturbation to plan any sane Western attacks. At the very least, their societies would never be the same…

Aint no Dhimmi

You don't suppose that our pathological narcissist of a president

Was sexually abused by his Imam in Indonesia, do You Marat 1.?

He says that he fondly remembers the Muslim. Call to prayer. Hmmmm…..

Citizen_Smith

When was the last time the Israelis lost an airline? Ooops, under socialist America, the only profiling one can do is against everyone but the majority of perpetrators, go ask Henry Kissinger. I advocated an immigration freeze following 911 including those seeking jobs from the south in el norte 'cause when you put up a brown New Worlder next to a brown jihadi, tough to tell; see how far that went. Pre-SecDef Gates was University of Texas president in the early years, and he dhimmied up and said don't lock rich Arabs out or the academy will just have to keep increasing tuition faster than health care inflation, still said it while SecDef and guess what; sleeper cells and Occupy Wall Street white kids with tuition debt….go figure!!!! If November recrowns the king, it's over. Issa Akbar!

kong.ming

The hypocrisy from the hate Imans must come to light and they must be revealed as no better than the serial killers and child molesters. Scarcity will push civilization into Moslem lands which are still in the dark ages as their resources are opened to the world, like the $3 trillion of minerals in Afghanistan. We've kept proactive by pitting two like enemies against each other. Fanaticism and corruption go hand and hand, which we are seeing now as the jihadists degenerate into a glorified drug cartel which funds terrorism.

wctaqiyya

Gunner57 said it. Consider this, for the most part, North Korea has been cut off from the world. The only N. Koreans we see are the few who escape by the skin of their teeth. This is a good thing. Cuba has been isolated from much of the world for decades. This is changing but the only Cubans we see in America are athletes or artists just before they defect and the ones who risk their lives on rubber rafts escaping from Cuba. This is a good thing. Nuff said about that. What prevents the U.S. from isolating selected Muslim nations as we have with the commies and Iran? I don't mean we need to cut off all contact, we can begin with eliminating all passenger plane connections to America from Muslim countries and prohibiting all Muslims from traveling into the U.S. Have a bleeding heart about this? You may want to know that Saudi Arabia places many restrictions on the Americans in their country including isolated living quarters and dress codes. Plus, Greece and Turkey exchanged hundreds of thousands of Greek Muslim citizens and Turkish Christian citizens on or about 1923. The idea of eliminating Muslims from America is not far fetched. Their students, chemists and scientists can go elsewhere or we can put them in isolated living quarters. North Korea, at most, poses a threat to regional peace and would certainly lose any war it starts. Yet they are almost completely isolated and we do not invite their students to study at MIT. Muslims pose an existential threat to western civilization and yet we fly the buzzards all over creation and import them by the boatload. Just how stupid is that? Get em out, close the door and bar it. Period.